It’s Friday only one last blog post before my day off, and the Feed

I love all you guys out there, but my personal life this week has been such that I’m looking forward to being able to just NOT MULTITASK for 18 hours this weekend. I have been dealing with house guests all week for one reason or another, nothing malicious on anyone’s part just people staying the night EVERY SINGLE NIGHT this week, and maybe I will have a night alone tonight while I blog and sleep late Saturday. Like I wrote earlier I love my readers, and I love the people who were forced to spend the night, but I love being alone more. I don’t know what it is but if there’s someone in the house while I’m trying to work I MUST INTERACT WITH THEM. I think I know the source of this, from when I was a kid and my undiagnosed Aspie tendencies would show when other kids would come over and I would retreat to my room to cool off from excessive interactions during my normal decompressing and alone time. But my mother would force me out of my room to “be with my friends” when other people came over and interact with them (even when I was forced to be in a dark room because I had sunburned my retinas from being at altitude in a mountain range in North Africa and just wanted to not talk to anybody). But to get back to it I went from needing to be alone to being compelled to interact with people because they are there, usually both at the same time. I like people when I can deal with them at a time of my choosing. And then hole up in my office until the next time I choose to be with people. That was one of the nice things about riding my bike, I was alone but I was out of the house and “doing things” so Mrs. the Poet was not on my back about sitting inside and “doing nothing”. And now you know way too much about my early life.

Bikeyface captures the insanity that keeps some people from cycling to work. Fear of Sweat I love how she made the second panel the cover art for her blog.

More on the victim of that driver that had a “seizure” and went speeding up the wrong side of a NYC street. UPDATE: Brooklyn Cyclist Killed by SUV Identified as Alejandro Moran-Marin The driver stopped when he ran into the concrete-filled steel bollards protecting the pedestrian plaza in front of the Barclay’s Centre. If those bollards were placed between the bike lane and the motor vehicle lane then there would have been a wrecked SUV and a live but frightened cyclist.

This NE judge knows what’s what. Hickman man goes to prison for Lincoln cyclist’s death More than twice the legal limit two hours after the wreck means absolutely blitzed at the time of the wreck. Twelve to 16 years seems about right, a little light for killing a man, but harsh for killing a man with a car. We need to work on getting killing a person treated the same regardless of the weapon.

I suspect the news outlet that published this has an agenda. Two crashes, including fatality, involve drivers who admit marijuana use One driver was obviously on something other than pot when he killed a cyclist, and the other driver admitted he was drunk. I mean “One officer said that Hargrave kept pressing down on the gas even after he crashed, causing his truck tires to dig a trench in the grass. As they continued to spin, the tires were ripped off the wheels” is not a person on pot, that’s a person on some kind of hallucinogen, or some other drug that impairs perception. Still this was another one of those wrecks that could only be prevented by some kind of barrier like those bollards that stopped that NYC driver having a “seizure”.

And second link shows how to get that decent infrastructure. Miami Designers Counter Florida DOT With Their Own Plan for Little Havana Corridor First of all you fire the DoT and replace them with the DoM, the Department of Mobility. Get rid of all the “highway builders” who have overrun cities with miniature Interstates with wide lanes and gradual curves, and replace them with people who understand the needs to build spaces for people and a way to get there without destroying the spaces for people elsewhere. If they insist that they need a manual give them a CROW manual for €90 each.

Or you could hire this guy, I have a sneaky feeling he’s going to be needing a job soon. IOWA DOT CHIEF: THE SYSTEM IS GOING TO SHRINK Looking at the stats it does look like IA has become the most overbuilt highway system with one mile for every 27 people. Unless you get a lot more 1%ers living there and somehow convince them to pay their fair share of taxes as a percentage of wealth there is just no financial base to support that kind of system. We gotta lotta extremely rich people and corporations in TX and we can barely sustain our current highway system with current tax revenues.

The first link out of several from BikePortland concerns crosswalk safety. 58 traffic stops in four hours at latest PBOT crosswalk enforcement action That works ou to be about 15 tickets per hour, not good. Maybe if they didn’t announce the day before on the evening TV news where the enforcement action was going to be, or put up signs on the sidewalk warning drivers to watch where they were going and pay attention to the crosswalks, then they would actually act as a deterrent to crosswalk violations.

As if to back the previous paragraph up we have this link from a nearby city. MEAN STREETS This is as thorough a indictment of crappy infrastructure in North America as I have read.

UK infrastructure news. MPs tackle Prime Minister over recent deaths of cyclists [slacker]Hey dude, you have like really bad infrastructure that’s getting a lot of little dudes and especially the dudettes killed, and you should have already fixed it with the money we gave you ages ago. What’s the deal man?[/slacker]

Another useless magic foam hat, with turn signals. Could the high-tech Lumos helmet help reduce the number of cyclist deaths on Britain’s roads? Could publicly executing drivers that kill reduce the number of cyclist deaths? My way tackles the source of the problem, drivers who “don’t see” cyclists because they aren’t looking and “I didn’t see him” is allowed as a defense to preclude even getting charged. Instead hitting a cyclist could get one shot in the public square and your body left to rot. Now which do you think would be more effective at getting drivers to stop hitting cyclists? A magic foam hat with flashy lights, or the knowledge that one’s corpse would be left as food for the local feral dog and cat population? As an alternative to public executions, I would allow executing the car instead, by shredding.

This looks like a great cycling destination. Abandoned States: Pennsylvania’s Abandoned Turnpike Pavement’s a little deteriorated after more than 40 years of disuse and having been laid in the 1930s, but it’s not too bad really, any touring bike that you would use on a gravel trail would work just fine.